How far are unjust laws to be obeyed? Need they be considered laws at…

It would be impossible to gain any adequate notion of the intellectual forces, that made up the mind of the average European statesman from 1600–1800 if we altogether omitted a consideration of the influence of Machiavelli.

It is not to revive of the corpse of past erudition that I have any desire, but rather to make more vivid the life of to-day, and to help us to envisage its problems with a more accurate perspective.

The ideal of Christendom as a whole, with Pope and Emperor at its head, gave way to the notion of the godly prince; and potent in some respects as was Luther's nationalist influence, it was not so much the German people as the sovereign …

... the medieval mind conceived of its universal Church-State, with power ultimately fixed in the Spiritual head bounded by no territorial frontier; the Protestant mind places all ecclesiastical authority below the jurisdiction and subject …

If ideas in politics more than elsewhere are the children of practical needs, none the less is it true, that the actual world is the result of men's thoughts.

The despots of Italy were, in fact, in the Greek sense, tyrants, and Machiavelli did little more than say so. What gives him his importance is that what was true of the small despots of Italy was going to become true of the national …